No.13 AFW+NFSA – John Huston & Luis Buñuel

Thursday 27 August 2015 – 7.30pm for an 8pm start

Cost – $15 for 3 consecutive NFSA screenings

Program:

Let There Be Light (John Huston) 1946, 58 mins. Sponsored by the Army with the aim of facilitating the employment of emotional causalities of combat by showing that they were not insane. Hidden cameras were used to film individual and group therapy at a New York Hospital. For reasons never made clear the Army then banned the film. It was finally released in 1980.

Las Hurdes = Land Without Bread (Luis Bunuel) 1932, 27 mins. Bunuel's one documentary is as startlingly original as his fiction. His uncompromising revelation of the desperately poor Las Hurdes region in northeast Spain, near the border with Portugal, anticipated the social documentary movement in Europe by overdetermining it. Bunuel sought to push his audience beyond pity, perhaps commenting on what is now known as "poverty porn". An academic narration over Brahm's majestic Fourth Symphony is designed to disconcert or anger the viewer, or even make her laugh.